Melody's Echo Chamber

Fat Possum;
2012

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At a Tame Impala show in Paris two years ago, Melody Prochet, French pop aficionado and multi-instrumentalist for the band My Bee's Garden, became intrigued by the Aussie psych-rockers' scuzzy sonics. She struck up a conversation with the band's Kevin Parker after the show about how he achieved the band's signature, blown-out bass sound in particular, and a while later he asked My Bee's Garden to support Tame Impala on a European leg of their tour. Though her own band's sound was clean and somewhat precious, Prochet remained drawn to the Tame Impala aesthetic. So when she decided to go solo, she asked Parker to produce, and to push her out of her comfort zone a bit. "I tend to write songs with pretty chords and arpeggios, and I was kind of boring myself," she recalled. "So I asked Kevin to destroy everything."

Mission accomplished. Recorded mostly at Parker's home studio in Perth, the resulting self-titled debut from Melody's Echo Chamber is a record of psych-tinged pop with just the right amount of thematic darkness and grime around the edges. Prochet has a way with melody and a voice that places her among the top-tier graduates of the Trish Keenan and Laetitia Sadier school of dream pop, but it's Parker's signature production that helps this record transcend its forever-in-vogue 1960s pop influences. ("This record was my dream sound," Prochet said in a recent interview. "I've tried for years to get it but finally found the right hands to sculpt it.") Full of immersive textures that give off an echoey depth and prismatic riffs that tumble through space, Parker's production grants this record its own laws of gravity.

The record's best songs tease out tension between soft and hard edges-- a combination of beauty and brittleness. Excellent lead-off single "I Follow You" pairs an exquisitely sugary melody with a fuzzy, syncopated riff, while the dreamy "Crystallized" detonates in its final moments into a kraut-y electro freak-out. Beginning with a toy-soldier beat and warmly warped synth tones, "You Won't Be Missing That Part of Me" blooms into one of the record's best moments, a kiss-off song that flips the usual script and takes the perspective of the heartbreaker rather than the heartbreak ("Because I lied with all my heart, because it's time to change my life... Hold on, you'll see it won't be that hard to forget me.") Parker's production is perhaps at its most stunning on "Some Time Alone, Alone", on which Prochet's arpeggios rain down like a chandelier being hit with a sledgehammer in slow-motion.

The shards occasionally prick: "Mount Hopeless" is fittingly gloomy, and there's even a song about post-plane crash cannibalism called "Snowcapped Andes Crash". But for as odd and chilling as that song sounds on paper, it falls flat in execution, languishing on a Side B that doesn't quite have enough ideas or surprises to save from some repetitive lulls. Prochet hasn't quite figured out how to do anything interesting with the macabre that lurks somewhere in this record's sound, and it leaves you wishing she'd explored Melody's dark side a little more, à la Broadcast's creepy masterpiece Tender Buttons. Of course, Prochet's melodies can't quite fill the Broadcast-shaped void left in the wake of Keenan's untimely death, but Melody's Echo Chamber is one of the more satisfying records to bear that band's influence in recent years. For a collaboration between a songwriter and a producer who helped push her to the outer limits of her vision, Melody's Echo Chamber is an impressively immersive debut.